David Hurn (Magnum photographer) recently described John Selway as probably one of Britain’s leading unrecognised artists. His work is flamboyant, inventive and nearly always spatially and temporally multi-layered through their construction of narratives. The exhibition at BayArt will include oil paintings, watercolours and digital drawings, many of them based on the story of Peter Pan. 

In John’s own words – “The exhibition content is a record of many years preoccupation with narrative. The narrative has been taken from a range of sources as diverse as the Holocaust, Dylan Thomas’s poetry, Jean Genet with the most recent being J.M. Barrie”s Peter Pan. In the case of Thomas’s writings the final images are heavily intermingled with my own biography. The paintings are an imaginative reworking of facts through the medium of the painted image so becoming rather like a visual novel, part fact, fiction, imagination. All of my works have these elements. “